This paper on technology and healthcare by Eric Mathews, which was published in Ends and Means, has an interesting insight into the effects of technology on health care. It shows one way in which our world has become exponentially encoded by technology since Heidegger's essay on technology.

Eric says that:

"For most of its history, medicine has been pre-technological: it has been 'scientific' only to the extent that it has been based on careful observation of such things as the course of diseases, the sorts of diet and regimen which tend to keep people healthy, the ways in which certain herbs or other forms of treatment seem to offer relief in some cases, and so on. Such empirical observation has enabled doctors to make reasonably accurate predictions of what will happen to a patient, and to offer treatment in a limited number of cases which works, if it does at all, because it fits in with the natural order, not because it defies nature. A patient's fever can be relieved by administering cold water to the patient's body. That may hopefully speed up the patient's recovery, if he or she is going to recover in the natural course of events, but it will not in itself cure the fever."

Eric describes the transformation in terms of the way we now understand health care:

"If we know the underlying causal mechanisms of the fever, and have other relevant scientific (e.g. chemical) knowledge, then we can devise drugs, not just to alleviate the symptoms of fever, but to cure it. Thus, someone who in the natural order would have died from the fever need do so no longer. Technological medicine takes human beings out of the natural order, and does so increasingly as new technologies develop. To save lives which would in the course of nature have ended by means of drugs is one thing; it is a much greater thing still to save lives by assisting the function of failing organs by mechanical means, as in renal dialysis or the use of heart pace-makers; it is going yet further to save lives by replacing the organs altogether by other organs, taken from other human beings or even from animals of other species. Each of these marks a step further from the natural order, from the governance of processes by impersonal laws of nature, with which human beings can only cooperate, to an order constructed by human beings."